Try hearing that all day, every day. Try hearing and feeling drip drip drip drip thip thip thip thip on top and inside your head all the time and then try such flippant comparison again. Every fucking time there’s the sound, there’s the sensation, the two make the phenomenon—drip drip drip drip thip thip thip thip means wetting of the same 1-inch radius, the same pi-inches-squared area, followed by geometrically different but equirhythmic radiations all day long.

I won’t talk—I won’t—and that’s why the dripping and thipping won’t stop, why a bit of my scalp is bare, why little, cracked bowls are wetted in the same time, time after time.

I thought this method of torture was bygone, but it’s 2013 already and still
I’m getting dripped and thipped insane by this routine, these habits, by myself. All the play I have now is with letters. No longer do I play with sounds, spoken words. No one would or will play like I want to.

This, here, my jungle gym, my wooden castle like the one distant daddy brought and built one Christmas—brought and built by daddy, played with ad nauseam, until that consistency became drip drip drip drip thip thip thip thip.

Though I’m aware of what’s happening and my body and the rest of me are free to go, I continue furiously and only semiapologetically; what separates this from my boyhood playground?

I suppose that since I am still that boy at heart I need to play, and since now I won’t play with my body like I used to, I must play with letters.

Flowers flatly fell to the ground that night, that night when that light, that hot garage light lit our love. That night when the wind washed the trees, swept the leaves, and cooled July to our comfort–we both remarked on it that night, remember?

You remember, don’t you? Promises abandoned but no harm just laughs, nervous, socially agreeable laughs. We laughed about how we always said we’d stop promising but kept on with it, how we kept wasting time, to translate. Seeds budded, falling flat. Falling flat but looking alive, promising, because we, you and I, were alive, promising.

But we’ve stayed together, and all that promise is gone. Now all we have are our fat, our regrets, our hopes of life beyond life, and each other.

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I write the voices--inner and outer; sometimes nonhuman, inanimate voices loudly or quietly or silently or nonverbally telling me what I see and hear and taste and smell and feel and think, how others might sense and feel and think under real or imagined circumstances and how that all hangs together--that contribute to my inner life.